February 11, 2014

Abraham Foxman retiring from ADL

February 10, 2014 4:23pm

Abraham Foxman, the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, says he’ll be stepping down in 2015. (David Karp)

NEW YORK (JTA) — Abraham Foxman, the national director of the
Anti-Defamation League, and one of the longest-serving and
highest-profile American Jewish organizational leaders, is retiring from
his post.
Foxman will step down on July 20, 2015, according to an announcement Monday by the ADL.
“For almost five decades, ADL offered me the perfect vehicle to live a
life of purpose both in standing up on behalf of the Jewish people to
ensure that what happened during World War II would never happen again
and in fighting bigotry and all forms of oppression,” Foxman, 73, said
in an ADL news release. “My years at ADL, particularly the 27 spent as
National Director, could not have been more rewarding.”

That's right, at least half a million dollars a year. Bullshit can't get much more rewarding than that.

February 03, 2014

He wasn't happy about the video and wanted it pulled. Further down the line he got more out of line and began to misrepresent the movement altogether but his basic point was that BDS, as currently framed, can't work.

Now take a look at Kerry shuttling all over the place (mostly between Washington and Tel Aviv) to try to get some deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. See what The Guardian had to say about his warning to Netanyahu:

Kerry... warn[ed] on Saturday that failure to reach a peace agreement
with the Palestinians would damage Israel's capacity to be a democratic
state and could lead to more boycotts.

"The risks are very high
for Israel," he said at an international security conference in Munich.
"People are talking about boycott. That will intensify in the case of
failure. We all have a strong interest in this conflict resolution.
Today's status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100%,
cannot be maintained. It's not sustainable. It's illusionary. There's a
momentary prosperity, there's a momentary peace."

So the genie's out of the bottle. BDS works. Certainly it works enough for Kerry to panic about bouncing Israel into a settlement that Kerry at least can sell to a sceptical world. But now here's a thing about which Finkelstein could be right.

In an interview last month with New Left Project's Jamie Stern-Weiner, Finkelstein expressed the concern that Kerry and Israel were trying to impose a settlement on the Palestinian Authority that might look sound in terms of international legality but will be a complete disaster for the Palestinians. He complained that BDSrs were ignoring the possibility of this and that a deal that had the PA accepting some kind of Greater Israel will make Israel's ethnic cleansing of those within its walls far easier in future.

As it happens this is what we abolitionists have worried about regarding the two state solution all along. Now in fairness, Finkelstein is often felt to place too much credence in the appearance of legality and I believe anyway that if a manifestly unjust deal is foisted on or accepted by the PA leadership then BDS will continue and hopefully Kerry's worry about the threat of BDS will not be misplaced.